


unknowns

by escapismandsharpobjects



Category: Grimm (TV)
Genre: "who are you?", FebuWhump2021, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Torture, Whump
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-13
Updated: 2021-02-13
Packaged: 2021-03-12 22:41:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,629
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29392149
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/escapismandsharpobjects/pseuds/escapismandsharpobjects
Summary: febuwhump day 12: "who are you?"His hands are tied up behind him, so tightly that they’re starting to go numb. His legs are tied up, too, but separately, each to the one of the legs of a chair. There is a thick blindfold covering his eyes, again tied far too tightly for him to have any hope of getting it off (he’d tried. Several times. But nothing had happened).Nobody’s here. He supposes they must be coming, though. People don’t generally get tied to chairs and blindfolded for no reason.
Relationships: Nick Burkhardt & Hank Griffin, Nick Burkhardt & Sean Renard
Comments: 4
Kudos: 15





	unknowns

**Author's Note:**

> hi!! sorry for posting this so late in the day i was out with my friends and didn't have enough time beforehand to post. anyway the violence in this is more graphic? i think? bc of the torture. which i am not usually a huge fan of but this was actually pretty cool to write. hope you enjoy!

His hands are tied up behind him, so tightly that they’re starting to go numb. His legs are tied up, too, but separately, each to the one of the legs of a chair. There is a thick blindfold covering his eyes, again tied far too tightly for him to have any hope of getting it off (he’d tried. Several times. But nothing had happened). 

Nobody’s here. He supposes they must be coming, though. People don’t generally get tied to chairs and blindfolded for no reason. 

He wishes he knew where he was. Who had taken him. He’d been exploring an old house, off the record, for reasons barely tangential to the actual case he was working. As far as he’d known, it didn’t belong to anyone, and no one in particular was using it, so he’d thought it’d be safe. 

He supposes it could still be. Just because being in that house is the last thing he  _ remembers  _ doesn’t exactly mean that it’s the last place he’d  _ been. _ Whoever has him could have grabbed him from anywhere. Which is decidedly not a comforting thought. 

Finally, he hears a door open and close. He figures whoever it is isn’t going to be anyone pleasant, but at the very least they’re a sign that  _ something  _ is happening. Maybe they’ll tell him what’s going on.

He hears the person approach, heavy, even footfalls and steady breathing. Someone well acquainted with people tied to chairs, presumably. They say nothing. Just stand in front of him. Nick pictures eyes scrutinizing him, calculating. He wonders whether it isn’t better that he can’t see.

“Who are you?” he asks, after he becomes sure that several minutes have passed. The person still has said nothing, hasn’t moved. It’s a little creepy and  _ entirely  _ too suspenseful. If they’re going to do something to him (which they  _ have  _ to, he figures), the least they can do is get on with it. 

In answer to his question, he hears something slosh, and scarcely has time to wonder what it is before freezing-cold water is poured onto his head. He coughs, sure for a second that they’re going to waterboard him, but nothing else touches his face. He shivers. 

“What the hell was that for?”

No answer. 

He sits there, dripping, trying to figure out what the game is here. He has to admit, pouring water on someone doesn’t sound like the most effective torture technique out there. He’s  _ cold, _ sure, but that’s it.  _ There must be something worse coming, _ he thinks. 

And there is. 

At first, it doesn’t seem so bad. He feels metal prongs poke into his neck, and then a jolt of electricity that moves his whole body. This happens a few times. It’s fairly exhausting, but not extremely painful, though being wet definitely isn’t doing him any favors. 

Eventually, the shocks stop coming, leaving him shaking, whether from the electricity or from the water, he doesn’t know. Presumably both. 

“Wh-who are you?” he asks again, through chattering teeth. If he just knows who they are, maybe he can reason with them, tell them what they want to hear…

No answer.    
“What do you want?” he tries. Still, nothing. 

Someone punches him in the stomach, which is...unexpected. They hit him a few more times before stopping abruptly, like they’ve changed their mind. 

Which he supposes they have. He’s hit again, across the chest, but definitely  _ not  _ with a fist. It feels...like some kind of pipe, maybe? Definitely metal. It makes a sort of hollow clanging sound every time it hits him. He tries to think of other things about the pipe. Maybe it was from a plumbing system, or maybe left over at a build site...anything to distract himself from how it feels slamming into his torso, over and over, each time causing him to lose his breath, barely able to catch it before the next hit is coming. It’s a dull kind of pain, but it hurts more than the shocks had, and he can’t stop himself from making occasional noises of pain. He’d ask them to stop, too, if he had the breath to do it. 

Like they’ve read his thoughts, the beating stops. It takes a moment for that to sink in, as his body feels so raw with the pain that for all he can tell they may very well still be hitting him. But it must stop, because he hears the pipe clatter to the floor. 

Everything just  _ aches. _ He tries to take a deep breath, feeling it catch in his throat with a kind of choking sound. It  _ hurts. _ His whole torso throbs in time with his heartbeat. 

“What…” he tries to ask, but the person slaps him across the face, sharp in contrast to the pain in his torso, and he feels tears well unbidden in his eyes.  _ Shutting up,  _ he thinks.  _ I got it.  _

The water comes back, for a split second welcome against the burning in his face and the aching in his torso. Then it’s just  _ cold.  _ He shivers, feeling the movement interact unpleasantly with his injuries. 

Then they stab him. He doesn’t even feel it at first. Not until the warmth of his blood becomes noticeable against his cold skin.  _ Then  _ he feels it. Shallow and thin, but definitely a stab, into his right shoulder. It burns.

Evidently, the knife is not done being used with just the one stab. Nick feels it trace a slow pattern across his face, and then cut a thin line from the corner of his right eye down to the middle of his cheek. It’s actually not that painful. 

And then the knife is back, tearing cuts through his shirt until he’s sure the fabric must have turned red. Each cut on its own doesn’t hurt too much, but all together they do. Several of them are right across the area on his torso where they’d beaten him with the pipe. These ones present an especially intense pain that makes him wish that they’d knock him over the head just a little bit too hard. Unconsciousness is sounding really good about now…

Another round of water is dumped over his head, stinging unpleasantly on his new cuts. Then they punch him in the jaw, and then again on either side of his face, sending his head from one direction to the other entirely too quickly. They finish off the punches with a powerful one to his already battered and cut torso, which makes him scream for the first and only time. He takes a shuddering breath that turns into something like a sob, and can’t stop himself from muttering, “please...stop.”

They...listen? He feels his legs get untied, though he’s in too much pain to use them to kick out at his captor. Then he’s being lifted, his arms never getting untied, just moved upwards until they clear the back of the chair. He feels his body get thrown over someone’s shoulder with a jolting pain that makes all of his injuries hurt at once, and then something is held over his mouth and nose and he doesn’t try to fight it at all, just breathes in as deeply as he can and willingly falls into unconsciousness. 

\--

He wakes up confused, shivering, cold, aching, still tied up, still blindfolded, lying on something that feels like dirt. He focuses his ears above the blood pounding in his head and hears a bird caw, hears distant cars. He’s outside. He’s  _ free. _

The ropes around his wrists are looser now, and he manages to wriggle his hands free, feeling his wrists grow slick with blood. 

As soon as he gets a hand free, he’s reaching up to tear off the blindfold, noting with discomfort the pulling feeling on every single injury on his torso. It comes away, and...he still can’t see.  _ Because it’s night, _ he reminds himself, blinking hard. A few stars twinkle in the sky, and faint moonlight comes through a cloud. He turns his gaze to his surroundings as he unties his ankles. 

He’s on a dirt path, surrounded by trees. They grow denser to his right and seem to disappear to his left. He hopes that means there’s a road, rather than some kind of cliff. 

He slowly gets to his feet, legs shaking underneath his weight. His body aches, and it feels like the hardest task in the world to just take a step, but once he starts walking it gets a little easier. He curls an arm protectively around his torso and starts off at a slow limp for the edge of the trees. 

A road. He’s never felt luckier in his entire life. It’s a fairly small road, with no cars on it and no lights on in any of its buildings, but it’s a road, and that means people, somewhere. People that can hopefully help him.

He looks around, squinting in the darkness, shivering in the cool nighttime air. There are no visible landmarks, just vague shapes that might be buildings or might be nothing at all. He wishes that the clouds would uncover the moon. 

Which they do, after a time. The moonlight reveals nothing but an empty stretch of road and a solitary billboard.  _ Great, _ he thinks, and then he looks at the billboard again and realizes that he knows it - he’d driven past it earlier, on his way to the house he’d been exploring. It can’t be far, then. He doesn’t know whether he should really go back there, but it’s the only familiar thing he can think of, and familiarity sounds pretty damn good, so he sets off. 

At some point, he passes the billboard. The moon disappears back behind the clouds, and when he turns around he can’t see the billboard at all. He wonders for a horrible second whether or not he’s delirious and imagining things, and then he sees lights up ahead. He goes towards them instinctively, not particularly caring who they might belong to. He’s nearly gotten close enough to make out distinct figures when he hears footsteps behind him, and the sound of a gun clicking. 

He raises trembling hands into the air, hoping he’s not about to get killed after all of this. 

“Who are you? Turn around slowly,” says a voice, and Nick  _ knows  _ that voice. He’s safe. 

Any adrenaline that might’ve been in his body leaves it all at once, and he collapses to the ground, which hurts quite a lot, but the relief of lying down more than makes up for it. 

Until he feels a gun press into his back. 

“Stop, stop,” he mutters, hoping he’ll be heard. “‘S me. ‘S Nick.”

“Nick?” 

He nods jerkily, face scraping against the asphalt. The gun leaves his back, and he feels himself get turned over, then finds himself looking directly into the face of his boss. He doesn’t think he’s ever been more grateful to see the man in his life.

Renard is still for a moment, kneeling in front of him on the ground, looking him up and down. 

Nick waits for him to finish doing...whatever the hell it is he’s doing and ask him what had happened. But the question never comes. Instead, Renard very gently helps him up into a sitting position. Then he pulls off his jacket, and Nick wonders what he’s doing, because it’s  _ really cold _ out here, and if he had a jacket on right now, he wouldn’t take it off for the world. 

And then there  _ is  _ a jacket on him, Renard’s jacket, too big but incredibly warm and dry, and he burrows himself into it as much as he can, grabbing its edges and pulling it tighter around his body. 

“What’s happening?” he hears someone say from above him. He resolutely does  _ not  _ look up at them, in fact scrunching his eyes shut. He really doesn’t want to share anything with anyone at the moment.

“I found him,” Renard says, and Nick experiences a shocking array of emotions in a few seconds as he realizes that there’s people out here who were looking for him. “Or, he found me.”

There’s a bit of chatter that he doesn’t really focus on, and then Renard’s hand is on his shoulder, and he’s asking whether Nick wants to tell them about it.

He really doesn’t. He shakes his head, feeling slightly overwhelmed as everything that had happened to him starts to sink in. 

“Okay, that’s fine,” Renard says, which is definitely not what Nick is expecting him to say.

His next statement is not addressed at Nick. “Clear up,” he says, and Nick hears feet moving away. “Thank you all for your help, but Detective Griffin and I have it handled from here.”

_ Hank. _

Nick hears another pair of feet approach and opens his eyes, relieved when the only people he sees are his Captain and his best friend. 

“Hey,” Hank says, sounding concerned but not pitying. “How are you doing?”

Nick shrugs. “Cold,” he says. “Wet...achy. Pain.” Not the most coherent sentence he’s ever uttered, though he figures it gets his point across well enough.

“I bet,” Renard says, rather gently. “We’ll get you to the hospital, and they’ll fix all that for you.”

He nods. The hospital...actually sounds pretty good, for once. He feels someone pick him up, very gently, though it hurts like hell anyway. 

He finds himself in the backseat of Renard’s car, lying down with his head across Hank’s lap. He’s pretty good for a makeshift pillow, Nick decides, as Renards starts the car. 

A short drive later, he’s being picked up again, and he watches with unfocused eyes as various doctors hurry up to their little group. Someone comes up with a gurney, and then he’s being set down onto it, and then he’s moving and Renard and Hank aren’t there, which is a scarier feeling than he’d like to admit, but then something pokes into his arm and everything fades away.

\--

He wakes up hurting less, feeling rather warm and very much dry. He feels a bandage on his face, another on his shoulder, something wrapped around his torso…

“You awake?”

He blinks his eyes open and looks around for a second, until he sees Hank. He gives him a tired smile, which Hank returns. 

“Feeling better?”

Nick nods. “Much,” he says. “Thanks.”

“No thanks for me?” comes a voice from his other side. 

Nick turns around carefully, eyes landing on Renard, standing next to the bed with what looks like two steaming hot cups of coffee in his hands. 

Renard must catch Nick’s eye, because he steps around the bed and hands one of the cups to Hank, pulling the other close to himself. “Sorry, no coffee for hospital patients,” he says, almost smiling. Nick gives him the same tired smile he’d given Hank. 

“How long until I’m  _ not  _ a hospital patient?”

Renard sighs. “A day at most. Nothing required stitches, but they’d like to keep you for observation for a while.”

Nick nods. “Thanks,” he says, figuring Renard will understand he doesn’t just mean thanks for the information.

Renard nods. There’s silence for a second.

“Nick…”

He knows what’s coming. 

“I’ll file a report,” he assures his boss. “Just...not until I’m out of here.”

“Okay.”

He’s immensely grateful that neither of them presses him to talk about it any further. He  _ will  _ talk about it, he knows, and it’ll be fine, but for the moment, everything’s a little too raw and he’s a little too tired to be able to do it.

His eyes slip closed, and he hears Renard leave. Hank doesn’t move, staying right where he is, and Nick knows this means he’s safe, so he gives in to sleep.

**Author's Note:**

> thanks so much for reading!!! i really appreciate it and if you leave a comment i will be so happy :)


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